Wow...NJ is completely different from MA!! Most towns in MA have a Superintendent, maybe an assistant super if the town is big enough, principals at each school (unless the town is really trying to save money ...we had a couple of years with a principal running between two schools which is NOT a good situation) and again, if the town is big enough, there might be a business manager and then there would also be some support staff in accounting and a couple of secretaries in the main office. A head of special education, maybe a head of technology/IT who might or might not have some support staff. Some districts are lucky enough to have a school psychologist on staff.
There IS no layer above them - that's it. No county layer - just the state department of education. Really different from NJ, it would appear.
Really small rural towns in MA have amalgamated school districts; they may have a more local elementary school, but generally share a middle and high school.
North Andover's budget for FY2008 (current school year) was $34M for 4,634 students. Of that, from a quick analysis, only $1M went to the central office in staffing and administrative costs. $2.3M was spent on maintenance and operations (which includes heating and electricity and water etc. - for 7 schools), $847K on transportation (busing mandated by the state for kids up to grade 6 who live more than 2 miles from the school - everyone else has to pay $300 per kid directly to the busing company), professional development - $211K, technology $95K, systemwide maintenance and ops salaries $415K...anyone got any quibbles with any of this??? $23M of the budget goes to salaries for teachers, aides, and principals (NA has 7 principals for FY08, with 2 vice principals each at the Middle School and High school - with 1100 and 1300 students approx. each) The principals earn about $100K on average (slightly less for elementary, slightly more for MS and HS - which is pretty much the going rate for these positions; the HS principal has a PhD, the others all have Masters degrees at a minimum)
I've spent literally YEARS analyzing North Andover's budget - we were always looking for ways to save money and put it into teachers' salaries, because class sizes were always an issue. Textbooks were falling apart and years out of date because the hard spending choices had to be made and when it's a teacher in front of the class or a set of new textbooks, which are you going to choose?
Our teachers also earned near the bottom of the scale when compared to surrounding districts; we lost teachers regularly to places that paid better and had lower class sizes.
I wish I could say that North Andover's budget troubles were unusual in MA, but they are/were not. Funding for education in MA is still very much a town-based thing, unless your town is very poor (think Lawrence) in which case the state pays the lions share. Per pupil funding in North Andover from DOE figures, for both regular day and special ed students (ie: the average) is $9,661 for FY07, but that includes almost $6.7M in health insurance funding for active and retired employees that isn't part of the education budget of $32M for FY07 (the town puts that amount in their budget - the state calculates it as part of per pupil spending). If you take that amount out, the per pupil spending is more like $7,175.
Health insurance costs for employees have skyrocketed in the last few years and take a huge bite out of town finances. Generally, town and school staff have a much higher percentage of their health insurance premium paid by the town than they would if they worked in the private sector, although this isn't by any means universal. My husband's company (Analog Devices) paid about the same percentage of our premiums (80% I think - no longer have that info). But given that teachers generally earn LESS than they would if working in the private sector at jobs that required a masters degree (which a large percentage of them have) this is considered part of the deal. It's become much more difficult to lure people into teaching and KEEP them in the classroom than it was - teachers leave the profession in droves after only a few years. Anyway, this is a long and complicated discussion and we're a long way from the original topic!
Clearly, things do vary from place to place in the US, and even within MA. There are a few very wealthy towns (think Wellesley or Weston - the "W" towns as we used to refer to them) that have citizens who clearly value education above all else and fund it to the hilt - spending $7K MORE PER PUPIL than NA for 2006. And then there is the relatively well-off town of North Andover that has very little in the way of a commercial or industrial base, with residential property taxes funding just about everything, who don't want to spend a penny more than the bare minimum. Different attitudes - different results.
Here in Ontario, school funding is not tied to the local tax base - it's done on a provincial basis. That generally works much better, though the formula could do with some tweaking at the moment. The school boards here are generally very large - there is one board for the entire city of Toronto - which covers some 553 schools and 275,600 students - and superintendents can have as many as 25 schools to administer. No evidence of administration overload here as far as I can tell!
